The Black Tongue

by Marko Hautala

  The most obvious change took the longest to understand. There was nobody in the yard. No daycare staff with hordes of children in tow. No neighbors huddled together in serious conversation, no men leaving for work and stopping for a few words on politics (the world’s most boring topic, but fascinating to listen to because of the tense exchanges). No retirees sitting on benches, occasionally scolding, then instructing and entertaining, groups of children, sometimes even handing out a chocolate bar without anyone thinking they must be pedophiles.

  It looked like everyone kept indoors and to themselves these days. Samuel stood at the window for hours and saw only three signs of life: two people walking quickly across the yard, an elderly man, and a woman exiting a building, pushing a stroller. The only larger group of people consisted of immigrants, all men, gathering under the barbecue shelter for a moment. The fiery ends of cigarettes waved in the air for a quarter hour before the group split up again.

  The yard and the buildings around it gave off an air of a temporary rest stop for people passing through. Their real lives were somewhere else, where single-family homes were built and people looked like actors in ads for insurance companies and SUVs. The years had stolen something important. They’d stolen the feeling that this was good enough. Despite all the vices and closed-mindedness and the urge to stifle anything that stood out of the ordinary, these buildings had acted as walls against the darkness emanating from the sea and the villas, its source some inhumane, unknown place. That dark wind chilled bones all over the world. But never before had it reached all the way here. Until now.

  Suddenly Samuel felt guilty, as if he’d played a part in how empty the yard had become. After all, he had always been fixing to leave, wanting to be anywhere else but here.

  The thought of leaving brought the gas station and the woman to mind. He turned away and tried to force other thoughts into his head. He randomly pulled a book off his dad’s shelf and turned its pages. An old-book smell flooded him, reminding him of pipe tobacco and wall-to-wall carpets. He’d picked out a book that had been there since his childhood, with its dark leather covers.

  “Where the proletariat fights consciously, the liberal bourgeoisie ceases to be revolutionary!”

  Samuel looked at the spine.

  J. Stalin, Works, Volume 2.

  He had been gone for too long to remember how his dad had been a Stalinist all the way into the ’80s. He only remembered the terms uttered with excitement: scientific socialism, the proletariat, class traitors. His dad’s rants about how Finland was being unnecessarily held back by the bourgeoisie when revolution was inevitable.

  Samuel leafed through the book, finding sections with thick underlining.

  “Down with capitalism!”

  “Long live socialism!”

  “Down with the Czarist monarchy!”

  He stopped at each exclamation point as if he’d located a piece of unknown inspiration right in front of them—the kind of inspiration that had forced his dad to get out of bed even in his final mornings. He had fought every day, viewed himself as a hero. Maybe he had been happier than the young unemployed and individuals beaten down by their poorly paid jobs because he had an ideology and his exclamation points. He never bowed down to anyone, and he hadn’t been afraid of the future. Even nuclear war hadn’t scared him.

  “The bourgeoisie will collapse regardless,” he’d guffawed when Samuel had asked how inevitable a nuclear war was. “You don’t need a war for the downfall to come. Finland has enough Communists—the Soviets will protect us should we end up in a war.”

  His dad had always crossed the yard with his head held up high. No one had dared to debate politics with him. Did anyone walk with their heads held up high these days?

  Suddenly Samuel realized how empty the apartment was. The space was filled with an unidentifiable whirring sound and the ticking of a clock, perhaps in the kitchen.

  He had to return to the TV, to press “Play” on the VHS player. To watch a moment from twenty-six years earlier, a moment that had suddenly become available for outsiders to observe, yet he couldn’t go back and change the memory of it, or forget it, or smooth over any of the details.

  Of course Samuel had to jerk off, even when it caused intolerable shame. But how else was he going to focus on what was important?

  And that was to focus on the slow movements of the lips on-screen. On the hand that simultaneously stroked fifteen-year-old Samuel’s neck. On the gaze that appeared different with each viewing: first sarcastic, then condescending, indifferent, finally abysmally mournful. The yearning gaze of a lost memory. A cry for help.

  Samuel rewound the tape and played it from the beginning.

  A few seconds of black, crackling sounds, then static that warped in the upper edges of the screen. Then a clear image. In the background a buzzing sound and a hint of an echoing room, although all he heard was white noise.

  Then a hollow click and the screen goes dark. The white noise grows louder while the screen remains black.

  Then Julia is standing there. Looking serious, in a slightly amusing way, like a precocious actor. Not sad or contemplative, but calculatingly dramatic. Her pale green gaze does not waver (he couldn’t tell the color of her eyes on the tape, but Samuel’s memory filled in the gaps). Her hair moves in the wind. Julia had always looked odd, like a glittering piece of meteorite half-buried on a sandy beach. Her hair wasn’t one of the primped, permed, or relaxed messes that everyone else but punk-rock kids wore. She didn’t even wash her hair with shampoo—she’d said so herself.

  “Suvikylä is a beautiful and peaceful place on the western coast of Finland, right by the sea,” Julia says on camera. “Little would you think that—”

  Samuel moved his lips along with her. The delay was barely noticeable as his memories stirred and turned into words. How effectively he’d soaked it all in: each gesture, intonation, and word. And yet that delay existed. He needed an old VHS tape and a living image on a CRT screen to bring his memories back and transmit them disjointedly onto his lips to form rudimentary words.

  Images changed on the screen. Samuel recognized each take. Toward the end he had been behind the camera more often, and not because he was better at filming—Julia had been better in front of the camera. She was naturally fake, self-assured, made to be a celebrity. She could’ve been anything.

  Samuel’s eyelids twitched as familiar scenery and sounds were revealed to him. He felt like he was about to fall asleep, about to drift through the screen, grasping at the notion that time was remarkably relative.

  Then, the villa.

  Samuel stopped breathing. He continued gulping shallow breaths as he stared at the frozen image.

  It shows a large, three-story wooden villa, with a tower on the left side like a fairy-tale castle. Julia stood in front of it.

  Her actress’s charisma disappeared. There stands Julia in windless scenery. The evening sun and its color of thick, bubbling honey are supposed to make her look gorgeous. They should keep her warm. But Julia is pale like a ghost, as if she were freezing.

  “Ew, what stinks?” she asks the camera.

  “No idea,” Samuel said.

  Not on tape. He said it there, on his dad’s couch. The fifteen-year-old Samuel says nothing.

  “This is . . .” Julia stops and gags, pressing her arm against her nose and mouth.

  The camera stays on her, except for a small nudge that cuts the top of her head out of the frame. There’s a faint buzzing of bugs in the background. They’re the little dots rushing across the screen.

  “This is so gross,” Julia says.

  Suddenly Samuel remembered the smell that the tape had not been able to transmit. He remembered throwing up on the large rocks at the shore. A wave had cleaned the vomit off right away.

  The camera is raised slightly, and for a moment Julia is there entirely, head and all. Then t
he image is nudged again.

  “What’s that sound?”

  Samuel’s voice, a young boy’s voice, is so near that it cuts through the white noise, keeping it almost muted for a while. Julia lets her arm fall off her face and leans over. Her eyes jerk from side to side, as if controlled by a mechanical arm.

  Then, among the white noise and the buzzing of the bugs comes a high-pitched shriek. Like someone screaming inside a bottle.

  “It’s coming from over there,” Julia says and lifts her left hand.

  The camera turns toward the sound. A large white villa comes into focus.

  “Come on,” Julia says outside the frame. You can hear she’s covered her nose and mouth again.

  She goes first. The image follows her with a reckless bounce. Despite the quality, what Samuel saw on-screen now was much clearer than what he’d seen back then. The tears that had followed his vomiting had blurred his vision.

  Julia walks up the stairs into the house. The shriek grows louder.

  “It’s coming from the cellar,” she says and points at the stairs that lead down below. “Come on.”

  The dark rectangle of the door grows larger.

  There’s a woman’s voice.

  “What are you doing here?”

  The camera is yanked down.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here—”

  All Samuel saw was grass flying by quickly.

  That’s where the recording stopped.

  Samuel jumped off his dad’s couch and rushed to the bathroom. He leaned on the edge of his dad’s piss-stained toilet bowl and heaved a couple of times, but nothing came out.

  “We have to go . . .”

  It was the TV in the living room. The water in the toilet bowl was barely moving.

  “. . . back there . . .”

  Samuel’s ears popped. Then his left ear began to ring. His old fear of getting tinnitus came back. It was all those late evenings from five to nine at band practice when he was a teenager, and the volume had always been turned all the way up. All those shows, completely wasted while standing right next to the loudspeakers. Peer Günt, Mana Mana, Death Angel, Suicidal Tendencies, Bad Religion, and all the bands he couldn’t even remember. Later he’d wear wireless headphones at home while the children were asleep. He’d open a can of beer and blast Nirvana or Pearl Jam or Tool as loud as he could to relive that feeling of freedom, when he could just walk out the door and think, Today I can do anything my meager income allows, and after that I’ll borrow more. The sky was enormous above him. He didn’t need to travel. The sky and his hometown were infinite.

  But already that feeling of freedom he experienced as a twenty-year-old had become a yearning for the impossible. He had become infected by sorrow. Julia had been gone for a while, the early glimpses of happiness had been lost, tainted in something so evil and incomprehensible that he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it.

  Samuel did not throw up. Instead, he cried. His tears fell into the toilet where the water had sunk below the stain ring when no one had been around to use it.

  When he got back to the living room, the screen shows Julia on the bed again and his own skinny fifteen-year-old body. Julia’s eyes focus on the camera.

  Too much happened in one lifetime; nobody could trudge along, pulling a full sled of experiences. Something had to give. Yet this here had been a part of every single thing Samuel had ever done. It had been in everything he’d ever said to Krista when they first met. In the drunken waltz they danced in the hotel hallway after their wedding. In the birth of Aada and Iines and their baptisms. In Krista morphing into a stranger who merely shared his bed. All of this had been echoing in the background, hundreds of miles away, but at the same time it had been near to him, as if it had shared his basement when he closed his eyes at night and listened to the hum in his ears.

  Samuel realized he was whispering words. The same words Julia’s mouth mutely formed on-screen. Again and again.

  He walked into the foyer and threw his coat on. The door slammed with a loud bang as he left, sending an echo through the stairwell. It was all just one big basement to him.

  The rain had finally stopped. Samuel walked with determination, trying to keep his head up high like his dad.

  The woods behind the townhome garages had been ravaged by the storm. The soaked tree trunks looked like the limbs of large, strong animals. Their yellow leaves flitted in the wind like a beast’s lure waiting to catch its prey.

  The path began where it always had, under the beech and its twisted branches. The path would take him through a marsh, through sinking mud where the sea and the land hadn’t quite decided which of them should rule over the other.

  Reeds swayed along the path. Someone must’ve used it all these decades. The distant glow from the streetlights was enough to light part of the way along the path, but it quickly turned pitch-black. Samuel took his first step into the darkness. When his feet began to sink in the mud, he tried to remember Julia’s sad eyes and her mute words.

  “I hate you,” she’d mouthed on tape.

  She’d repeated it like a bitter mantra. Or a curse.

  As Samuel waded on, he thought he could see Julia’s figure like a shadow in front of him. Her eyes full of rage, yet at the same time fearful. Her hair was glued to her forehead and pale cheeks like shiny calligraphy.

  Julia showed him the way. Julia, who hated him.

  THE MORONIC MOON

  When Samuel was fifteen he realized he was never alone: he shared a room with his little brother Aki, and when he walked out to the yard, it was filled with daycare staff with groups of children, or men smoking cigarettes on the benches, or that bully Jape with his crew revving their mopeds. If Samuel was in his room and began to hum to music on his headphones, soon either his dad or Aki would emerge out of nowhere to grin idiotically at him. He never had longer than five minutes in the bathroom before someone knocked on the door.

  When Samuel looked in the mirror, he entertained the thought that a camera was hidden behind it. It made no sense, but he’d never had any reason to think otherwise.

  Someone always saw him. Someone was always watching, listening, judging, keeping tabs on him. Samuel didn’t own a single moment. He accepted his fate like a prisoner who was well aware that the flap in the door could open at any time. A faceless pair of eyes would stare at him and judge his deeds.

  Then came Julia and everything changed. She showed him that the cell door was ajar. That two people could be one, yet alone, in their own realities.

  Julia had appeared unexpectedly and fearlessly in the summer of 1987. Samuel saw immediately that she was of a different, more wondrous breed. Usually odd people looked somewhat familiar, like you’d seen a relative somewhere. Samuel thought about how there were only about ten types of people, and everyone’s facial features, body structure, and tone of voice were determined by these types. But not Julia’s. Julia was something else. Julia was a promise.

  She appeared in the middle of a block party. The adults were grilling sausages, with at least three cases of beer keeping them company. Cranky Raimo from Building Two, who always told kids not to kick soccer balls against the wall, was everyone’s best buddy that night, even the kids’. He offered a swig from his flask to Samuel’s dad. They were surrounded by a ridiculous swarm of mosquitoes, but everyone was having a great time. Adults started asking the teenagers about music, and even his dad put his Walkman on to listen to Kreator’s Pleasure to Kill before handing it off to Raimo, who quipped that his Anglia made a similar sound when the exhaust was busted. “Should I record my car, then sing in English over the sound and send it to the radio station? Let’s buy leather pants and take Anglia on an American tour! Let’s leave our wives behind and steal both women and money from the capitalists.” Anita from downstairs, who usually remained quiet, said that she thought the Beatles were pretty good. “Boys,
you should listen to the Beatles. They’ve got some fine meldodies.” Foreign words weren’t her forte.

  Samuel and Harri nibbled at their charred sausages. One good thing about block parties was that Jape and his crew didn’t dare to come slap them around when adults were present. They’d go talk to the adults in packs of five, even to the ones they talked shit about behind their backs. They didn’t even glance at Samuel and Harri. Instead, predictably, they talked about mopeds and cars. Harri was bullied even worse than Samuel in those days. They said Slayer and Motörhead sucked, and they should listen to Finnish bands like Popeda and Eppu Normaali—the bands Jape played loudly on his boom box while standing on his balcony topless, arms spread out, singing along to the lyrics about galloping to the liquor store. The world was made for people like Jape. Samuel just had to accept it.

  “Who’s that?” Harri said and nodded toward the parking lot.

  Samuel looked over, expecting to see a second cousin of the son of a second cousin from the Hagert gypsy family.

  An odd girl stood between the two apartment buildings. Her head was tilted, and a strange device covered one of her eyes. First Samuel thought it was a spyglass, because nobody had video cameras. Julia represented something never before seen on Patteriniemi Road, but only Samuel understood this. Harri had already returned to eating his burned sausage.

  “I’ll go ask her,” Samuel said.

  “Why?” Harri asked.

  Good question. The only time girls on Patteriniemi Road even looked at them was to yell, “Your commie dads were marching again in the first of May parade,” or “Come here, you commies, so we can suck you off,” which was an outright lie. The girls’ dads were at least Social Democrats, but only people taking part in the annual May marches were included in the taunts, and those were Harri’s and Samuel’s dads. The band Venom made these girls pretend that they had to puke. They’d never play Metallica on the radio, unlike Eppu Normaali and Yö.